Performance enacting mobility and shifting borders – the global countryside?

ABSTRACT

This essay considers how performances by Takayama Akira (founder of Port B) are made to explore experiences of mobility and migration among people who traverse geographical and geopolitical spaces in Japan and elsewhere. In making works that uncover hidden sites that are connected to diasporic and migratory passage, Takayama invites reflections on questions of borders, zones, regions, and the passages between them. Our paper will discuss how Takayama’s work is a form of place-making. His tour performances and mobile ideas of theatre create complexities around the meaning of place in terms of re-spatialized institutional strata and civic designations. We aim to explore how civic institutions and designations such as “rural” and “city” are being broken and/or made liminal. Our paper will outline how this spatial dramaturgy has ramifications for the “global countryside” (Woods) as something both institutionalized and yet to be.

KEYWORDS:

• Takayama Akira
• tour performance
• place-making

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Also relevant to consider are studies that explore urban space, politics, and history in Japan. See, for example, Yoshimi (1987); Sand (2013).

² For further details on Takayama and place making see Eckersall et al. (2009), Hagiwara (2011), Marschall (2021). For a contrasting discussion of place making and social design in the post-Fukushima era in Japan see Dimmer (2016).

³ The company is named in memory of the French-Spanish boarder town Portbou where Benjamin died while fleeing the Nazis, and several of the company’s works are closely informed by his writings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Eckersall

Peter Eckersall (PhD in Asian Studies, Monash) is Professor of Performance Studies at the Graduate Center CUNY. His research interests include Japanese theatre, dramaturgy and contemporary performance. He monographic publications include: Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013), New Media Dramaturgy (coauthored 2017) and Dramaturgy to Make Visible (2024). He is the cofounder and dramaturg for Not Yet Its Difficult.

Tom Looser

Tom Looser (PhD in Anthropology, U. of Chicago) is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at NYU. His areas of research include Cultural Anthropology and Japanese studies; art, architecture and urban form; new media studies and animation; and critical theory. He has served on the editorial boards of journals such as Mechademia and the new Asian Diasporic Visual Arts, and has published in a variety of venues including Boundary 2, Japan Forum, Mechademia, Shingenjitsu, Journal of Pacific Asia, and Cultural Anthropology.